Information is critical to businesses in today's highly competitive environment and interconnected society. As a result, businesses use a variety of information tools to assist them in making more intelligent business decisions. Some of these tools include report tools used to analyze business performance and, in some cases, forecast business performance. Other tools are data mining tools used to identify previously unrecognized relationships and associations in a business's data store. In some cases, the analysis of the data produced by the tools can be used to improve Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions within the business in order to increase performance.
The foundation for better analysis of business performance is the collection of data related to transactions of the business. This data can be captured using from various online transaction processing (OLTP) applications that record transactions and/or behaviors of customers when the customers interact with the organizations in some way. Typically, the collected data is organized and stored by the business in a variety of data stores (e.g., data bases, data warehouses, and the like). Also, the data stores can include information gathered from various data mining, Word Wide Web (WWW) mining, and Decision Support System (DSS) applications.
Some businesses may deploy a variety of BI reports that allow the organization to use other reporting tools, such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools (e.g., MicroStrategy, Cognos, and others) to create dimensions, metrics, filters, and templates associated with analyzing and viewing the business's data. The created dimensions, metrics, filters, and templates combine to form the BI reports that process against the business's data in order to display results in tables and/or graphs. Further, some report tools permit visualization where data presented within the tools can be interactively modified or expanded to provide customized analysis.
Moreover, businesses develop or purchase data mining applications to assist the business in identifying associations and relationships within the business's data store. For example, a data mining application might identify a relationship between a geographic location and a product of service of the business, such that there is a higher probability of making a sale when the sale is made within the identified geographic location.
Conventionally, a business hires a business analyst who understands the data and can effectively use the report tools, visualization tools, and the data mining tools to interpret the data. The business analyst uses the various tools to answer business question or to develop plans to meet business objectives. In doing this, the business analyst will collect data, build data store tables, build reports, build data models, create visualizations, access data mining tools, and the like.
Yet, much of the analysis performed by a single business analyst within the business is not shared or leveraged with other business analysts within the business. Accordingly, much of a business analyst's time is expended sifting through a variety of previously developed reports in search of existing reports that will provide value to the business analyst's current task/problem. Often times to avoid the delay, a business analyst will forego the search for existing reports and define a new report that meets the needs of the business analyst. However, technical staff within the business often creates/modifies reports, so any new reports or modifications to existing reports must be passed to the technical staff, which usually requires a technical review and update schedule. This can result in a substantial time delay before the business analyst acquires the report that he/she desires.
Furthermore, since each business analyst within the business has his/her own individual technique duplicative reports are proliferated within the business. Additionally, many relevant and useful existing reports are undetected by the business analyst. Also, since the business analyst is manually trying to identify relevant existing reports, the search process is not consistent and/or optimal because it relies on the skill and technique of the individual business analyst.
Therefore, there exists a need for providing techniques, methods, and tools that better identify and to define related or new reports within a business's data store. With such techniques, methods, and tools, businesses can more timely and efficiently answer business questions and develop plans to meet business objectives. Moreover, with such techniques, methods, and tools, businesses can improve the quality of information that is culled from the business's data store to facilitate better analysis of the data.